Purpose This paper aims to develop a novel tabu search algorithm for solving the sequencing problems with precedence constraints. Due to constraints, the traditional meta heuristic methods can generate infeasible solutions during search procedure, which must be carefully dealt with. On the contrary, the candidate order based tabu search (COTS) is based on a novel neighborhood structure that guarantees the feasibility of solutions, and can dealt with a wide range of sequencing problems in flexible manner. Design/methodology/approach Candidate order scheme is a strategy for constructing a feasible sequence by iteratively appending an item at a time, and it has been successfully applied to genetic algorithm. The primary benefit of the candidate order scheme is that it can effectively deal with the additional constraints of sequencing problems and always generates the feasible solutions. In this paper, the candidate order scheme is used to design the neighborhood structure, tabu list and diversification operation of tabu search. Findings The COTS has been applied to the single machine job sequencing problems, and we can see that COTS can find the good solutions whether additional constraints exist or not. Especially, the experiment results reveal that the COTS is a promising approach for solving the sequencing problems with precedence constraints. In addition, the operations of COTS are intuitive and easy to understand, and it is expected that this paper will provide useful insights into the sequencing problems to the practitioners.